In answer to an earlier question I posed to myself, Herschel Burke Gilbert was the composer of the Gunsmoke theme. We're watching Rosemary and Thyme, a BBC series about two single ladies who have an idyllic country garden home and solve crimes every week. The music is lovely. I'll have to check the credits again to see the composer but the theme (borrowed from the Paul Simon song from The Graduate)is played by John Williams the guitarist.
Susie, my hapless stepdaughter, had the misfortune this morning to hit a deer on the busy road between I-71 and Carrollton. She wasn't hurt. The deer expired after a brief time and was given to a poor man for food.
I got glasses, bifocals, this morning and discovered to my delight that I can see much better to drive and to see the TV and the digital readout on the radio across the room. I wish I'd got trifocals, actually, because I can see my laptop screen better without the glasses, so I can't see to write and watch the idiot box at the same time. A good solution would be to turn off the TV and leave it off. Moving to Canada is also a thought.
I've been reading the "87th Precinct" police procedural novels of Ed McBain. They are entertaining, pure fluff, a wonderful escape. I enjoyed Blackboard Jungle when I read it in high school, and never read another novel by the same incredibly prolific writer who died this year. (Every young male teacher then was nicknamed "Daddy-o" after the protagonist, who was played by Glenn Ford in the movie, which began with Bill Haley and the Comets screaming "Rock Around the Clock.") I decided to try one of the 87th books, which were highly lauded in McBain's obituary, and am glad I did.
I printed "a prayer for the 2,000th US soldier to die in Iraq" and taped it in the rear window of our car. I saw a young man reading it in the Wal-Mart parking lot the other day, nodding his head. A letter was in the rag tonight exposing a provision in the "No Child Left Behind" foolishness that requires public high schools to allow military recruiters to have access to the names of students. Why, I bet Bush's approval rating here is down a whole two percentage points because of all that has gone on in the past two months.
A tornado recently struck a trailer park in Evansville in the dead of night and took more lives there than all the others taken by tornadoes in the United States thus far this year. We had a little lightning and thunder here and were surprised to hear of the severity and deadliness of the twister down the river from us. Of course a trailer park is the worst possible place for a tornado to touch down, and the darkness hours and the month of November caught the people unawares. The fragility and uncertainty of life were once again demonstrated. There are those who believe that life began of a fluke, so they would not be surprised that it ends for so many with one.
I saw some sign that said "Remember Our Veterans." Does one ever get a chance to forget them in Indiana? As someone wrote decades ago, Indiana is a militaristic state. We have a cannon or a tank or a statue of embattled soldiers on every courthouse lawn in the state. I would have liked the "New Hill Road" named simply as "Jefferson Street," which it is for part of its course, but someone named it "Veterans Memorial Highway." (Probably the same people who decided that we are going to remain on "slow time.") I'm an old soldier too. I toyed with the idea of being an officer and was invited to go to OCS when I was doing my stint in the late fifties. A wisdom born of the collective unconscious of my family must have warned me to decline. I had a brother who wanted to be an ace fighter pilot and ended up being a tail-gunner in a B-17 crippled over Das Vaterland (another militaristic state, at least back then) and he made it back to England with his life but not his emotional stability for the rest of his days. I served honorably as a Willie and Joe dogface grunt in peacetime if not with distinction. I was crazy (and drunk) enough from my days in the Peace Corps in West Africa, let alone being in combat. War sucks and there is nothing glorious about it. There are too many profiteers for it to be a noble thing.
Good night and good luck.
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